“No. But neither can anyone else. And think about it— all the towns downslope from Lowell are gone— Franklin, Drexler, Osaka, Galileo, I imagine even Silverton. And all those were transnational towns. A lot of channel mining towns are vulnerable, I should think.”
“So both sides are attacking the infrastructure,” Nadia said dully.
“That’s right.”
She had to work, there was no other choice. She got them going again on robot programming, and they spent the rest of that day and the next getting the robot teams out to the drilling site, and making sure the start-up went right. The drilling was straightforward; it was only a matter of making sure that pressures in the aquifer didn’t cause a blowout. And the pipeline to transfer the water north was even simpler, an operation that had been fully automated for years; but they doubled up on all the equipment, just to make sure. Up the north canyon roadbed, and on northward from there. No need to include pumps; artesian pressure would regulate the flow quite nicely, because when the pressure dropped low enough to stop pushing water out of the canyon, the danger of a breakout at the lower end would presumably be past. So when the mobile magnesium mills were grinding along, scooping up fines and making pipe, and when the forklifts and frontloaders were taking these pipe segments to the assembler, and when that great moving building was taking in the segments and extruding pipe behind it as it rolled slowly along up the road, and when another mobile behemoth was going over the completed pipe, and wrapping it in aerolattice insulation made from tailings from the refinery; and when the first segment of the pipeline was heated and running— then they declared the system operational, and hoped it would make it 300 kilometers farther. The pipeline would be built at about a kilometer an hour, for twenty-four-and-a-half hours a day; so if all went well, about twelve days to Nili Fossae. At that rate the pipeline would be done very soon after the well was drilled and ready. And if the landslide dam held that long, then they would have their pressure valve.
So Burroughs was safe, or as safe as they could make it by their efforts. They could go. But it was a question what their destination should be. Nadia sat slumped over a microwaved dinner, watching a Terran news show, listening to her companions debate the issue. Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists, communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words
“We should join whoever we can, and help fight!” Angela said.
“I’m not fighting anyone,” Nadia said mulishly. “It’s stupid. I won’t do it. I’ll fix things where I can, but I won’t fight.”
A message came over the radio. Fournier Crater, about 860 kilometers away, had a cracked dome. The populace was trapped in sealed buildings, and running out of air.
“I want to go there,” Nadia said. “There’s a big central warehouse of construction robots there. They could fix the dome, and then be set to other repairs down on Isidis.”
“How will you get there?” Sam asked.
Nadia thought it over, took a deep breath. “Ultralite, I guess. There’s some of those new 16Ds up on the south-rim airstrip. That would be the fastest way for sure, and maybe even the safest, who knows.” She looked at Yeli and Sasha. “Will you fly with me?”
“Yes,” Yeli said. Sasha nodded.
“We want to come with you,” Angela said. “It’ll be safer with two planes anyway.”
They took two planes that had been built by Spencer’s aeronautic factory in Elysium, the latest things, called simply 16Ds, ultralite delta-winged four-seat turbojets, made mostly of areogel and plastics, dangerous to fly because they were so light. But Yeli was an expert flier and Angela said she was too, so they climbed into two of them the next morning, after spending the night in the empty little airport, and taxied out to the packed dirt runway and took off directly into the sun. It took them a long time to rise to a thousand meters.
The planet below looked deceptively normal, its old harsh face only a bit whiter on the north faces, as if aged by its parasite infestation. But then they flew out over Arena Canyon, and saw running down it a dirty glacier, a river of broken ice blocks. The glacier widened frequently where the flood had pooled for a time. The ice blocks were sometimes pure white, but more often stained one Martian shade or other, then broken and tumbled into a mix, so that the glacier was a shattered mosaic of frozen brick, sulfur, cinnamon, coal, cream, blood. . spilling down the flat bed of the canyon all the way to the horizon, some seventy-five kilometers away.
Nadia asked Yeli if they could fly north and inspect the land that the robots were going to build the pipeline over. Soon after they turned they received a weak radio message on the first hundred band, from Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier. They were trapped in Peridier Crater, which had lost its dome. It was to the north also, so they were already on the right course.
The land they crossed that morning appeared negotiable to the robot team; it was flat, and though littered with ejecta, there were no little stopper escarpments. Farther on in this region the Nili Fossae began, very gradually at first, just four very shallow depressions, curving down to the northeast like the fingertips of a faint handprint. A hundred kilometers farther north, however, and they were parallel chasms each 500 meters deep, separated by dark land that had been heavily bashed by craters— a kind of lunar configuration, reminding Nadia of a messy construction site. Farther north still, they got a surprise: where the easternmost canyon debouched onto Utopia, there was another aquifer outbreak. At its upper end it was simply a new slump, a big bowl of land shattered like a broken plate of glass; lower down, patches of frosting black-and-white water surged right out of the broken land, ripping at the new blocks and carrying them away even as they watched, in a steaming flood that caused the land it touched to explode. This shocking wound was at least thirty kilometers across, and ran right over the horizon to the north, with no sign of dissipating.
Nadia stared at the sight and asked Yeli to fly nearer. “I want to avoid the steam,” Yeli said, absorbed in the sight himself. Most of the white frost cloud was blowing east and falling down onto the landscape, but the wind was fitful, and sometimes the thin white veil would rise straight up, obscuring the swath of black water and white ice. The outflow was as big as one of the big Antarctic glaciers, or even bigger. Cutting the red landscape in two.
“That is a hell of a lot of water,” Angela said.
Nadia switched to the first hundred band, and called Ann down in Peridier. “Ann, do you know about this?” She described what they were flying over. “And it’s still running, the ice is moving, and we can see patches of open water, it looks black or sometimes red, you know.”
“Can you hear it?”
“Just sort of like a ventilator hum, and some cracks and pops from the ice, yeah. But we’re pretty loud up here ourselves. Hell of a lot of water!”
“Well,” Ann said, “that aquifer isn’t very big compared to some.”
“How are they breaking them open? Can people really break those open?”
“Some of them,” Ann said. “The ones with hydrostatic pressure greater than lithostatic pressure are in essence lifting the rock up, and it’s the permafrost layer that is forming a kind of dam, an ice dam. If you drilled a well and blew it up, or if you melted it. .”
“But how?”
“Reactor meltdown.”
Angela whistled.
“But the radiation!” Nadia cried.
“Sure. But have you looked at your counter lately? I figure three or four of them must have gone.”
“Wow!” Angela cried.
“And that’s just so far.” Ann’s voice had that distant, dead tone it took on when she was angry. She answered their questions about the flood very briefly. A flood that big caused extreme pressure fluctuations; bedrock was smashed, then plucked away, and it was all swept downstream in a pulverizing rush, a ripping, gaseous, boulder-filled slurry. “Are you going to come over to Peridier?” she asked when their questions trailed off.
“We’re just turning east now,” Yeli replied. “I wanted to get a visual fix on Crater Fv first.”
